Papacat and babycat... taken this morning!

I decided to do a special dinner to celebrate yesterday’s big accomplishment. Neither of us have been all that tempted by comfort food lately, but last night he requested an old favorite: smothered-bbq-baked tofu. Dinner was great but didn’t seem enough of a tribute to his awesomeness, so I made cupcakes, too. I served them on the little dish he gave me at Christmas: a customized cupcake stand by Jeanette Zeis Ceramics. Jeanette is an Atlanta-based artist and vegan, known throughout the country for her careful, detailed work. Why, just recently her work popped up on theppk.com’s recipe for caramelized beets!

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It says “Your Smile Makes Me Smile”, which is one of our little sayings. :-) You can order your own customized cake stand from Jeanette at her Etsy shop. Sure would make a sweet little Valentine’s present, especially when topped with a home-baked vegan treat!

You probably already know that instead of offering a meal delivery Thanksgiving week, I made up a special a la carte casserole menu. I spent Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday prepping and cooking orders. Here are a few shots of some of the food that went out:

Cutting and dusting marshmallows for sweet potato souffles. They were created with Angel Food Alice’s marshmallow mix. It’s the least-tricky way to make marshmallows that still requires a fair amount of care, and I recommend you buy several packs immediately.

Emanuella’s nut-free souffle.

My first attempt at a seitan-based tofurkey came out looking beautiful but with the texture of an old shoe. Dousing cut pieces with a little water and reheating in the microwave under a damp paper towel restored some moisture – steaming would have worked, too. Unwilling to serve this to paying company, I tried another recipe with resounding success. Behold, the log:

Stuffed with fat-free stuffing (per Brett’s family request), steamed and baked, VeganDad’s recipe is a solid one. If you try it, though, be sure to modify the seasonings – his recipe is very mild. I modified the recipe to become no-added-fat by substituting two tablespoons of mushroom stock for the oil.

Local pot-roasted vegetables for Lillian.

Fancy-schmancy “goat”-style log for ever-classy Brett’s family. Would you believe this little fella took over 24 hours? I wrapped it up in parchment and secured it with pretty brown ribbon, repurposed from a delicious box of Lagusta’s Luscious bonbons.

A yukon-gold-topped shepherd’s pie for Shannon.

and desserts: sweet potato cake studded and topped with roasted chestnut and miso caramel; “sweet potato souffle” – sweet potato cake with chestnut pieces and topped with homemade marshmallow. I also made several dozen mini chocolate kandaicakes.

Pecan-topped sweet potato souffle, with some of my kitchen staff looking on.

Lillian was thrilled to pick up her giant order! I love cooking for Lillian because she adores even my mistakes. Case in point: I had to ditch a pan of sweet potato cakes when they wouldn’t release. I mashed ‘em up, layered ‘em with miso caramel, called it a trifle, and gave it to Lillian. She was so pleased!

I am so grateful to everyone who picked up Thanksgiving food this year. Not only did the sales make my three-year anniversary trip with Nate possible, but it was just such an honor to be invited into your homes at such an important meal and special time of year. Seriously, I still get goosebumps thinking about how awesome that is. I hope it lived up to your expectations!

After a few extra-long days, Nate and I were happy to sit down to our own Thanksgiving eve feast.

The seitan shoe with creamy mashed potatoes.

Carr’s wheat crackers with spreadable “brie” in the background.

My momma’s (and Nate’s) favorite butterbeans.

Our gorgeous sweet potato souffle.

Closer, m’dear…

Our green bean casserole. Thanks, Trader Joe’s, for frying the onions so that I didn’t have to saturate every inch of fabric in my apartment with the smell of fried onions.

Nate’s abundant plate! From the top: Carr’s crackers with brie, mashed potatoes, sweet poatto souffle, cranberry hunk, butterbeans, green bean casserole, dressing, and the seitan shoe.

One of the best parts of Thanksgiving day was finally getting to meet my little niece Bear. I like this picture because it looks like Nate & Bear are sharing a laugh.

Little Bear puppy face.

A fun picture of my brother, Bear, and me.

Y’all know I’m a crazy cat lady, but Thanksgiving turned out to be a puppy day. Later, at my Uncle Reuben’s, I held his partner’s little chihuahua. Until then, I had never so much as touched such a small dog… hence the face.

She was fun to cuddle.

How you know it’s love: after a long day of cookin’, cleanin’, and family visitin’, I returned to Atlanta to make Nate’s childhood favorite, creamed onions. Y’all: creamed onions is not a southern thing. We do not boil pearl onions, smother them in gravy, and then serve them as a holiday side. Twas a mystery to me when Nate mentioned them. So I did a little internet searchin’ and decided on an amalgam of a few recipes. The cream sauce is just a gravy made with earth balance, flour, and a whole lot of mimiccreme – then thinned out and seasoned with salt, pepper, and a bit of freshly-shaved nutmeg. Not bad for a first try!

]]> http://cracktheplates.com/2011/11/thanksgiving/feed/ 6 http://cracktheplates.com/2011/11/how-i-spent-election-night/ http://cracktheplates.com/2011/11/how-i-spent-election-night/#comments Wed, 09 Nov 2011 04:54:17 +0000 adriennefriend http://cracktheplates.com/?p=2984 exciting things are happening! Metro-Atlanta counties will be getting 3.2 billion for schools, Sunday liquor sales for the first time in over a century (except in Forest Park), Ohio voters ‘emphatically’ reject Kasich’s anti-union law, and the crazies in Mississippi won’t get their way.

Meanwhile, Nate and I spend the evening doing crafty things: making video game/8-bit Perler art, or “sprites“. We wanted to DO something – not just sit around and worry. Create, not imbibe. And time really flies when you’re making sprites, all the better for those of us keeping an eye on returns.

First, I cooked a mostly from-scratch meal for the first time in possibly two weeks? Intense emergency dentalwork + the worst cold in years put me out of commission… but I’ll be back in time for Crack the Plates deliveries on Tuesday, hooray! Tonight, just a simple homemade tomato sauce with sauteed seasoned soy curls over tortiglioni – easy, but still with a sense of accomplishment. Mostly, though, we made things:

Nate finishing a project.

My Mario garden. Interested in perler crafts? Learn more here.

Perl lookin’ pretty.

Taking note of her father perilously balancing a netbook, Unix decided she just had to join him. He was not so pleased.

“What, papa? Dis are problem?” “Ok, I are guess not Unix.”

And that’s how we spent election night 2011.

And so did my meal delivery folks! Let’s take a look at what they’re having this week, shall we?

Click “more…” to keep reading this post.

Main courses this week:

• creamy chana masala, a long-simmered Indian stew with freshly-ground spices and coconut cream (three & five meal plans)
• a twist on the cassoulet, with cannellini beans and fennel four ways: oven roasted bulbs, feathery fronds, & toasted seeds, topped with Tuscan fennel pollen (three & five)
• pad thai with tofu, lime & peanuts on the side (three & five)
• Bryant Terry’s smothered seitan-chops in mixed-mushroom gravy, with locally-grown shiitakes (five only)
• Chilean pastel de choclo, a shepherd’s pie-like concoction with a creamy fresh corn topping (five only)

Sides this week:

• Nate’s favorite dal with fried onions – organic yellow and pink split lentils boiled with turmeric & salt, spiced with toasted cumin seeds, chipotle powder, and coriander, with lemon juice and garam masala for balance (3 & 5)
• roasted root vegetables in a creamy roasted garlic & lime sauce (3 & 5)
• sweet-savory stir-fried vegetables (3 & 5)
• slow-cooked southern speckled butterbeans (5)
• freshly-shaved field corn with jalepenos (5)

Chana Masala with coconut cream

Fresh corn with pastel de choclo. The latter is a version of Terry Hope Romero’s recipe from Viva Vegan! I wanted to make it last week but ran out of time.

fennel four ways cassoulet, made with roasted bulbs, feathery fronds, toasted seeds, and topped with fennel pollen

Roasted fennel and garlic. This week’s hummus was roasted garlic – those three heads in two finished cups, whoo!

just a simple pad thai noodle.

Bryant Terry’s seitan medallions in mixed-mushroom gravy

This dish was phenomenal, one of the best things I’ve made all year. Let’s take a moment.

When I was a little girl one of my most favorite foods was pork chops. I grew up in the rural countryside and while we had a pig companion animal for a short while (no, we did not eat her; a wild animal did), I hadn’t yet made the connection between pigs and porkchops. We were also on the poorer end of the economic spectrum, so (my mom recently confirmed this) we often had meat only once a week, and when we did, they tended to be the cheapest cuts. I remember mamma battering and frying a whole mess of these small, skinny cuts and then throwing them in a half-inch of oil in her electric skillet. I could eat six at a time.

Of course, I now know the source of those pork chops – abhorrent, abominable factory farms – and am certain that animals aren’t for our use, but are ends in their own right. But I still love and seek out rich, fatty, salty vegan versions of former favorites. One of the best places to look for such recipes is Bryant Terry’s book Vegan Soul Kitchen.

My new favorite recipe in Vegan Soul Kitchen is his Smothered Seitan Medallions in Mixed-Mushroom Gravy. You can check out the recipe on Vegetarian Times here or see what it looks like in the book on Google books here. Also, you should probably listen to Terry’s NPR interview here about his Thanksgiving menu.

The recipe has four components: fresh mushroom stock, mushroom gravy, fried seitan, and then all of those things put together (the final recipe). The only changes I made were minimal: substituting boxed organic mushroom broth for fresh (couldn’t afford all the extra mushrooms for stock, didn’t already have enough stems on hand), adding locally-grown shittake mushrooms, and clipping chives from my back porch garden instead of green onions. I added a fifth component by making seitan fresh before I started the recipe (with more mushroom stock) instead of using commercially-available seitan pieces.

two cups of mushroom gravy, just hangin’ out

crispy battered and fried seitan.

the finished dish

The recipe takes a lot of time to make, but it is so totally worth it. In fact, Bryant Terry tweeted at me the night I made it with the following: “hand on bible, i cried the first time i tasted that recipe after testing. glad you like!” (If you’re on twitter, follow him here.) Yeah, it’s that good. Make it soon!

Just some simple stir-fried veg, to pair with the pad thai and lessen the guilt. ;-) This recipe actually contains no fat at all! (Probably a first in my kitchen this year, if we’re being real.)

Terry’s roasted root vegetables in creamy roasted-garlic lime sauce. I used a mixture of (all organic) carrots, turnips, sweet potatoes, celery root, and beets.

A mixture of plump fordhook and freckled speckled butterbeans.

Nate’s favorite dal with fried onions and lots of cilantro.

So, in summation, the five meal plan:

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That’s all for this week, folks! Gotta head to the market to get fresh vegetables for next week’s yumminess. Let me know if you’re ordering!

]]> http://cracktheplates.com/2011/09/one-month-of-meal-deliveries/feed/ 1 http://cracktheplates.com/2010/06/19mos-bbq-tofu-okra-and-mashed-potatoes/ http://cracktheplates.com/2010/06/19mos-bbq-tofu-okra-and-mashed-potatoes/#comments Thu, 01 Jul 2010 00:43:42 +0000 adriennefriend http://cracktheplates.com/?p=727 Let’s get this embarrassing fact out of the way: my bf & I are the kind of saccharinely sweet couple that celebrates monthly anniversaries. Groan, right? Well, generally the “celebration” just means a slight uptick in cooing at each other & maybe a vegan chocolate or two, but every once in a while we mix it up & do something interesting. As in the case of tonight’s dinner:

or

that’s

• organic vegan mashed potatoes (unsweetened soymilk, earth balance, salt, & freshly cracked black pepper)
• bhindi masala: okra with cayenne, ground mango powder, turmeric & tomato
• kitchen-sink homemade barbeque sauce (a slight adjustment to Isa’s recipe from Vegan with a Vengeance, featuring blackstrap molasses, peanut butter, liquid smoke, tabasco, maple syrup, vidalia onion, and tomato) simmered long & slow and poured over thrice-baked tofu

In return, he drew pictures for me of one of my most favorite things EVER! Goombas. Yanno, dese guys:

In other news, I used a paint-brush to line my eyes with some electric teal with blue sheen eyeshadow in an attempt to achieve this look. I actually did a pretty good job! Now we’re probably gonna go raid the free kids’ section of the movie gallery. Hurrah!

I emphasize my friends’ places-of-origin because I was so baffled by their lack of awareness of something I, a Southerner with extremely limited snow experience, so delightfully cherished. For truly, my familiarity with the stuff only extended so far as the infamous Blizzard of 1993 (which has its own wikipedia page) and fewer than a handful of other pathetic dustings. My ever-clever momma taught me about snowcreme when the blizzard hit, seeking, as she might have been, a way to distract the six restless nine-year-old girls who’d just been snowed in at my birthday party. (Yeah, the biggest meteorological event of the decade happened a day after my ninth birthday.) How could two people who grew up with seasons of snow year after year never think to whip it up in a big bowl with some cold milk, sugar, and vanilla? Heavens to betsy! I exclaimed, in my mom’s accent, I’ve got to teach these boys something!

Ever the inappropriately under-dressed, over-confident belle, I trotted out to the back porch in one of my more laughable get-ups: thin pink nightgown over pumpkin-print pajama pants, protected by a red WECI hoodie. I harvested the primo first layer of fluffy snowdust from the back-porch railing, even as new snow continued to come down. (Protip: There’s a narrow window between when the snow falls and when it gets soggy, hardened, and yucchy–so time your collection well.) Befuddled onlookers snapped shots of my work from behind the screen door:

harvesting snow

at work

As you can see in the picture, I did some of the work with the snowcreme on the back porch, feverishly whisking the snow into a sweet soymilk and vanilla base. By the time I got back in the house it was ready to be served.

I can’t quite remember how my housemate & boyfriend described their first experience, but I’m pretty sure the words “transcedent” “miraculous” “glorious” and others from their heavenly ilk flowed like honey in the kitchen conversation that day. And it didn’t hurt that I’d just made some of Isa’s pumpkin oatmeal cookies from Vegan With a Vengeance, either…

Zoomie (my housemate) delighting in cookies

…or that I decided to make a chocolate-mint version of snowcreme with Vitasoy’s Chocolate Peppermint holiday soymilk:

Lucky housemates. The feast:

Snowcreme recipe, veganized:

• Whisk some soymilk (vanilla, chocolate, or peppermint!) in the bottom of a large stainless steel bowl with a little organic vegan sugar and a dash of vanilla extract
• Go get some snow. Preferably light, fluffy, and fresh. Scrape it off into the bowl. Whisk til the mixture thickens. Grab a stainless steel spoon and start to do more stirring, less whisking. Add a bit more milk as necessary. Eat!!

Tonight’s dinner was generously provided by friends N & J in celebration of Nate’s upcoming birthday. As a special surprise, they prepared some sushi–Nate’s favorite–with avocado, carrot, and cucumber. (I brought over the materials to make a quick miso–red miso paste by Westbrae, cellophane noodles from Jungle Jim’s, japanese-style firm tofu, two cloves of garlic sliced thin and some kombu kelp.) Observe the taller N coach the shorter one on the wily ways of sushi:

Those are taller N’s in the foreground (second picture). Little N…well, let’s just say he could do with a little more larnin’:

But hey, who am I to judge? I didn’t even try! On that note…

In the interest of full disclosure (because this blog ought not be about my triumphs only, but about my royal struggles too), I will admit that I f-ed up not one but TWO desserts tonight. I fail so comprehensibly so infrequently that it is quite marvellous that I was able to do it twice in one evening. Still, I admit: I ruined some rice pudding by using short-grain BROWN rice and not cooking it through; mere minutes after wiping the apron of this masterpiece, I whipped up some chocolate pudding that didn’t set because my arrowroot was so expired it had completely lost its potency. Oops?

Le sigh.

Hope you’ll check out tomorrow’s update on cooking for Peace Forum: butternut squash soup that isn’t (DUN DUN DUN) …pureed!!! Better yet, just come have lunch! Tomorrow’s talk: “One Hill at a Time: Supporting Palestinian Nonviolent Resistance at Al Tuwani.”